Want more posts like this in your life? Join the Tiny Buddha list for daily or weekly insights.

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” ~Lao Tzu

I’d known for months that I was burned out.

The kind of burnout that creeps in quietly—behind your eyes, in your spine, in your calendar. I was volunteering in raptor rescue, monitoring eagle nests as the busy season ramped up, juggling consulting work, supporting adoption placements, writing, creating. I was showing up fully in every space except the one I lived in: my body.

And yet I refused to let go. I told myself it was just a busy season. That if I could push through, things would calm down. That my exhaustion was noble, temporary, necessary.

That’s the trap when you build identity around usefulness. You stop listening for limits.

Raptor rescue had become more than a commitment—it was part of who I was. I loved it. I was invested. I was finally making progress in catching and handling, and every shift brought new confidence. Even after everything I’d learned about rest, boundaries, and overfunctioning, I still couldn’t walk away.

It took getting kicked in the face by a great horned owl to wake me up. And I mean that literally.

The Moment It Broke Open

It was one of my regular volunteer shifts. I’d worked with this particular great horned owl before—had caught her successfully more than once. It felt like business as usual: enter the enclosure, take a breath, begin the catch.

Except this time, it wasn’t usual. And I wasn’t ready.

I took my eyes off her for a split second. That’s all it took.

She flared, leapt, and with perfect precision, delivered a full-force kick to my face before escaping.

Pain blurred into shock. And then into shame.

Wounded pride doesn’t begin to describe it. My confidence evaporated. I had spent months building trust, practicing skill, stepping into this work fully. And yet, in one moment, it all felt like it had unraveled.

I looked at my reflection in the mirror—face aching, spirit heavy—and the truth landed with brutal clarity:

I’m not on top of my game. And I’m making rookie mistakes. Because I’m too tired to see straight.

The Grief of Letting Go

People talk a lot about burnout. But they rarely talk about how hard it is to walk away from something that feels meaningful.

I wasn’t just physically drained—I was emotionally split. My time in raptor land had changed my life. It gave me resilience I didn’t know I had. It helped me feel grounded during periods of personal chaos. It reminded me that healing is messy and wild and worth it.

The idea of letting go wasn’t just sad. It felt unbearable.

And yet, I knew I had to. Not out of failure. Not even out of fear. But because continuing at the pace I was going—without rest, without recalibration—wasn’t sustainable. I was breaking. Slowly. Quietly. And now, visibly.

Letting go wasn’t graceful. It was layered and raw.

I cried. I wrestled. I tried to bargain with the truth.

And when I finally stepped back, I didn’t feel immediate relief. I felt lost.

The In-Between Is a Sacred Space

People don’t talk enough about the in-between.

That space where you’ve left something but haven’t landed in something new. Where you know what isn’t right anymore but aren’t sure what will be right next.

It’s disorienting. It’s vulnerable. It’s uncomfortable.

I wasn’t who I used to be—the eager, confident raptor catcher with fresh adrenaline in her chest. But I wasn’t yet someone with clarity about where to go next. My body needed rest. My spirit needed stillness. My heart needed time.

But my mind? My mind wanted control. It wanted answers. It wanted speed.

The in-between demanded something softer.

It didn’t want me to leap. It wanted me to linger. To listen. To relearn what strength looks like when it’s gentle, not forceful.

It’s the space where grief becomes teacher. Where identity sheds its armor. Where you realize you don’t just miss what you did—you miss who you believed you were when you did it.

What That Owl Really Taught Me

Yes, the kick hurt. It disrupted my rhythm. But more than anything, it delivered a message that I had been resisting:

Even the things that change your life aren’t always meant to stay forever.

There’s a difference between honoring a season and clinging to it. I wasn’t just volunteering—I was gripping. I was folding myself around an identity that made me feel capable, valuable, essential. I didn’t want to lose it, so I ignored the signs. I numbed out the signals. I kept showing up while my body whispered, “Not this.”

And then it stopped whispering. It got loud.

That owl didn’t punish me. She mirrored me.

And once I heard what she mirrored back—once I stopped resisting the truth—I began to ask what my grip had been keeping me from.

What Letting Go Made Room For

Letting go didn’t mean losing everything I loved. It meant loosening my grip long enough for something gentler—and more lasting—to find me.

I didn’t leave raptors behind. I shifted toward a deeper kind of care—one rooted in conservation, long-term observation, and relational presence. Nest monitoring, habitat awareness, quiet stewardship that still creates impact, but from a place of balance.

It wasn’t about giving up my place in raptorland. It was about learning to show up differently—without the urgency, without the exhaustion.

I’m rediscovering who I am in this space now. Someone who listens more. Who stays longer. Who works with the rhythm of the wild, instead of rushing through it.

Change doesn’t always mean departure. Sometimes it just means choosing a slower path, a softer landing, and a future built on sustainability—in nature and in self.

If You’re in the In-Between

If you’re standing in that strange, sacred middle—between what was and what’s next—I see you.

It’s not weakness to feel unsure. It’s not failure to step back. It’s not quitting to admit you need rest. The in-between is tender. It’s transitional. And it’s necessary.

Whether it arrives through heartbreak or a literal kick in the face by an owl, change will always come to escort you out of what no longer serves—even when you swear it still does.

You don’t have to leap before you’re ready. You just have to be willing to pause. To ask:

What am I gripping that’s already trying to release me?

What would it mean to let go gently, instead of waiting to be torn?

Can I honor the season I loved without dragging it forward?

Your next chapter doesn’t need to arrive with fanfare. It may enter quietly, through silence, through softness, through surrender. But it will arrive.

And until it does, the pause is not empty. It’s everything.

About Heather Allen

Heather Allen is a feline behavior educator and founder of Pet Sitting Cat Trainer, where she helps rescued cats rebuild trust through compassionate, relationship-centered care. Through her writing at Soul Life Lessons, she explores what it means to heal, soften, and reorient after burnout—often guided by the quiet wisdom of animals and the sacred space of the in-between.

See a typo or inaccuracy? Please contact us so we can fix it!

Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn’t even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined. Discovery, in its purest form, is nothing less than revelation.

On the pages of his posthumously published masterpiece The Book of Disquiet (public library), poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) considers the complex question of discovering yourself. He writes:

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

[…]

Everything is in us — all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.

It may be that we don’t know how to look because we are looking as tourists — passing visitors to the foreign parts of ourselves — rather than explorers. The spirit of exploration is something else altogether, requiring a total receptivity to experience — the mind uncaged from expectation and convention, the animal sensorium fully open to every channel of aliveness, the soul ready for the revelation of discovery.

Pessoa offers a brief, blazing set of instructions to himself for how to attain such revelatory receptivity:

To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.

Couple with Pessoa on unselfing into who you really are, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir’s instructions to herself for how to have a life worth living and Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being.

Want more posts like this in your life? Join the Tiny Buddha list for daily or weekly insights.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” ~T.S. Eliot

In my early twenties, I packed a backpack and boarded a plane alone with a one-way ticket to Southeast Asia. It was a move that baffled my father, inspired my friends, and quietly terrified me.

I was drawn by something I couldn’t fully articulate at the time: a craving for freedom, truth, and a kind of belonging I hadn’t yet known. What I didn’t realize then is that this two-year trip would imprint on me a version of myself I’d spend the next twenty years slowly forgetting, and then, almost by surprise, begin to reclaim.

Three weeks into that trip, I found myself in Northern Thailand feeling completely lost. I wasn’t sightseeing like I “should” have been, or checking off cultural highlights. I felt aimless. Lonely. A bit ashamed that I wasn’t “making the most” of the experience.

The structure I was used to (school, expectations, a tidy plan…) had fallen away. I felt unmoored, as if I’d made a huge mistake. Who was I to think I could just wander and have it mean something?

And then I met Merrilee.

She was older, solo, sun-wrinkled and wise—the kind of woman who carries stories in her skin.

Over an afternoon spent talking at our quiet guesthouse, she helped me see something I hadn’t yet understood—that the point wasn’t to fill the time. The point was to be with myself. To let the lack of familiarity and structure teach me how to listen inward. To begin trusting my own rhythm and desire without external cues.

The kind of freedom I’d dreamed of required discomfort first and a willingness to stop outsourcing my worth to what I was doing.

That single conversation changed the entire arc of my trip. And it changed me. Forever.

For the first time, I felt connected to myself not because I was achieving something, but because I was simply attuned. I moved at a pace that felt good. I made decisions from joy, not obligation. I stopped trying to prove anything. And in the middle of that season of self-connection, I met the man who would become my husband. A new chapter began rooted in love and partnership, and eventually, in motherhood.

And slowly, without really realizing it, the version of me that woke up in Thailand began to dim.

Over the years, I became a mama to two beautiful boys. I cultivated a stable career. I managed a household. I became, in many ways, the kind of adult we are told to strive for: organized, reliable, efficient, productive. I wore those traits like armor, and at times, even like a badge of honor. But beneath it, there was a soft ache.

I had flashes of her—that younger, aligned me—the one who had danced through temples, laughed with strangers, trusted the moment. I saw her in photos. I reread journal entries and marveled at how whole I’d felt. But the distance between us seemed too wide. I didn’t resent the life I’d built. I just felt like I’d built it around everyone but me.

Some seasons are shaped by who needs us and how we choose to show up. And when we decide to set aside our deepest longings for the sake of others, it can serve as a useful contrast.

Maybe that soft ache was there to remind me that while raising children, tending to aging parents, or holding together the invisible threads of a household can offer deep meaning and purpose… it’s not the whole of me.

Somewhere in my early forties, with my kids nearly grown and a job that no longer felt right, the stirring got stronger. Roaring and insistent.

Only this time, it didn’t send me packing to the other side of the world. It sent me inward. And I was ready for it now. I had the capacity to respond.

I began exploring new trainings. I started a side business that brought me alive in ways I hadn’t felt in years. I slowly reduced how much I was giving to my secure job to devote more time to the work that felt aligned with my soul. I was awakening again, but with responsibilities and relationships that complicated the path.

Eventually, I knew it was time to leave my job entirely. It was a leap that, while intentional, shook me more than I expected.

The weeks after submitting my resignation were not the liberating breath I’d anticipated. Instead, I felt untethered, afraid, and riddled with doubt. Who was I now? What if I failed? What if all of this was some naive midlife fantasy?

Every structure I had leaned on—title, paycheck, certainty—was gone. I felt like I was falling. And then it hit me: I’d been here before.

That lost, floating, what-the-hell-am-I-doing feeling? It was the exact same emotional terrain I’d walked through in Thailand. Only now, I had more to lose. The stakes were higher, so the fear was louder, but the lesson was ultimately the same.

To let go of structure without losing myself. To trust the process of becoming before I had evidence of it all working out. To believe that flow, intuition, and joy are valid guides, even in business.

This time, there was no Merrilee waiting for me on a bamboo veranda. But there was embodied memory. There was me. There was the version of me who had lived it once and come alive because of it. The gift of having that experience in my early twenties wasn’t just the adventure. It was the blueprint it gave me for how to find my way back when I felt lost.

I didn’t have to figure it all out from scratch. I just had to remember who I was when I felt most alive. What she trusted. How she moved. What she believed.

She didn’t need five-year plans or marketing funnels or perfect clarity. She needed space. And courage. And breath. She needed to like herself and to let that be enough.

And so, I began letting that version of me take the lead again.

Building a business, especially one rooted in healing, service, and soul, isn’t just about offers and strategy. It’s a spiritual path. It asks you to meet your edges, again and again. It confronts your conditioning. It stirs up your doubts. But it also calls forward your truest voice: the one that got quiet when you were busy being “good” and responsible and reliable.

For years, I looked back on that time in Asia with a kind of reverence—a fond and distant memory of a life I couldn’t believe I was once brave enough to have lived. I never saw it as a departure from real life, but I did place it in a separate category, a luminous chapter that shaped me, but felt hard to access again.

Now I see it more clearly. That moment was the original map of who I am when I’m not trying to be what the world wants. And now, in this middle chapter of life, I get to choose her again.

Not by backpacking across the globe (though I admit that’s tempting), but by waking up each day and building a life, a business, a version of myself that’s led by truth, flow, and trust. It’s scarier now. But it’s also richer. Because I know what it feels like to come home to myself.

And I know the ache of the contrast if I don’t.

Maybe you’re reading this and feel like you’re standing at a similar threshold, untethered, uncertain, trying to trust the pull of something deeper.

If so, let this be your Merrilee moment.

The path might feel blurry. You might question whether you’re wasting time, or if you are foolish for wanting more.

But what I continue to learn in new ways is that the process of returning to yourself and recentering your needs doesn’t always come with clarity. It often arrives with chaos. With fear. With silence. With the pain of letting go.

But what’s waiting for you on the other side of the unraveling is a more vibrant you. And that person is so worth meeting again.

About Natasha Ramlall

Natasha Ramlall is a trauma-informed mind-body health practitioner. She helps individuals see their pain in a new way which moves them into more evolved levels of mind-body health, wholeness and healing. To learn more or work with her, visit humanistcoaching.ca and get her Journaling Bundle to explore how this tool can support you.

See a typo or inaccuracy? Please contact us so we can fix it!

Want more posts like this in your life? Join the Tiny Buddha list for daily or weekly insights.

“I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.” ~Rumi

There’s a particular kind of heartbreak that happens when you realize some of your prayers are going nowhere.

There’s a painful silence that follows unanswered calls. Yet, despite the ache, I can still feel the pull to pray to the God outside of myself—that old reflex to place faith in something bigger, some invisible force in the sky, who, apparently, can make things happen magically here on Earth.

But it doesn’t always go that way, does it?

I prayed my cancer would go away. It didn’t.

I prayed the world would heal from climate change. It didn’t.

I prayed my business would make enough to live on. It didn’t.

I prayed my book would reach thousands. Still hasn’t.

I prayed for peace in the world. It’s getting worse.

So, I stopped. Stopped praying. Stopped hoping in that way where my heart is wide open and a little desperate.

It didn’t feel brave. It felt hollow. But in the silence that followed, something shifted within me. When the noise of asking subsided, a quieter truth emerged.

For a long time, I thought my discomfort came from out there. From God. From other people. From difficult situations. Blaming something outside myself gave me a sense of control—a story to hold onto. But no matter how convincing that story was, the ache inside remained.

It took time, but eventually I saw it: the root of my suffering wasn’t external at all. It was internal.

When I finally stopped waiting for life to bend to my will and turned inward, I came face-to-face with something uncomfortable—my attachment to control.

What I discovered was a mind conditioned to grasp, to fix, to be right, to judge, to compare, to push. And most of the time, that’s where the struggle began—when reality didn’t match my expectations. I’d get caught in loops of thought, unable to see clearly, tangled in ego and forgetting the essence of my being—my heart.

The heart is where our whole, compassionate selves live. We feel it. We recognize what Howard Thurman called the sound of the genuine. That’s who we are—at our core.

So, it’s not that I lost faith entirely. It’s that I relocated it. I remembered the genuine within.

Now, I have faith that life will unfold as it will, and sometimes, that’s painful. Life doesn’t often match the visions we hold. It burns plans to the ground. It humbles. It disappoints.

And still, I have faith.

I have faith in the goodness of the human heart. I have faith that we can hold grief in one hand—the image of the life we imagined—and, with the other, steady ourselves enough to rise and take the next step forward.

I have faith in our ability to choose compassion over entitlement. To sit with discomfort and still reach for the just response. To place our hand on our chest, close our eyes and choose to respond—not from the head, but from the heart.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s what God actually is.

Not some white-bearded man in the sky. Not a distant savior. But the part of us that knows how to return—not to the mind’s spirals, but to the body. To the breath. To the quiet pulse of the heart.

What if we—all of us, even world leaders—stopped looking to the God outside and, instead, returned to the one within?

Because the God within doesn’t need to be right. The God within doesn’t dominate or divide. The God within creates peace. Is peace.

And maybe that’s the kind of faith we need now.

Because when faith in something outside of us falls away, what’s left?

We are.

About Lara Charles

Lara Charles is an Australian writer exploring the deeper threads of life through thought-provoking personal essays and memoir. Her work has appeared in national and international publications. She is the author of the Substack newsletter Deeper Threads and a teacher on the global cancer support platform Thrivers Ark. Her debut memoir, Joy, Regardless, is a powerful reflection on illness, identity and self-discovery. Discover more about her work at laracharles.com.

See a typo or inaccuracy? Please contact us so we can fix it!

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ~Rumi

Before 2011, I had heard many spiritual teachers talk about “accepting what is.” It sounded nice in theory, like good mental information to chew on. But it didn’t feel embodied. I understood it intellectually, but I wasn’t living it.

Then I attended a weekend intensive with a teacher I deeply respected, and something in the way he explained it hit deeper. It wasn’t just talk. The essence of his words turned a spiritual idea into something I could start to live.

In that talk, he shared a story about a father whose son had become paraplegic. The father was devastated because he had so many expectations—that his son would go to college, graduate, get married, and have children. But those dreams died the day of the accident.

The father was still living in a mental loop: “I should be going to his graduation.” “I should be at his wedding.” He couldn’t let go of the life he thought his son was supposed to have.

The teacher explained that the father needed to grieve his expectations, not just in his mind, but in his body. That hit me hard. It was like an athlete expecting to win a championship and then getting injured. They’re stuck in that same mental trap: “I should have had that career,” and they suffer for years because life handed them a different card.

That story cracked something open in me.

The Weight of ‘Shoulds’ on the Body

I’m someone who tends to be idealistic. I had high expectations for myself, others, and how life was supposed to go. And when people didn’t live up to those ideals, whether in business, relationships, or everyday interactions, it really hurt. I believed people should be honest, ethical, and truthful. They shouldn’t lie; they shouldn’t manipulate. I had a long list of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” that governed how I expected life to go.

When life didn’t meet those expectations, I felt disappointed, angry, even hateful at times. My body held the tension. I had chronic stress, emotional pain, and health challenges. For six months, I was even coughing up blood, and doctors couldn’t find anything wrong. Looking back, I see now that I was holding on so tightly to my expectations that my body was breaking under the pressure.

This is what that teacher was pointing to: that to truly accept what is, we have to grieve our expectations on a body level. It’s not enough to tell yourself affirmations like “just accept it” until you’re blue in the face. You have to feel where your body says, “No.”

That means noticing: does your body feel heavy? Is your heart tight or tense? If there’s anything other than lightness or peace, then there’s something you haven’t grieved or released.

By staying present with those sensations, without trying to fix or change them, you start to feel shifts. The signs of release are subtle but real: yawning, tears, vibrations, or a sense of energetic movement. It’s like something in your nervous system finally says, “Okay, I can let go now.”

Letting Go Became the Practice

After that retreat, I spent the whole summer sitting with these “should” beliefs. Every day, I made time to observe my thoughts and emotions. I noticed how often I was clinging to ideas like “I should have done this” or “they shouldn’t act that way.” It was uncomfortable at first. I didn’t realize how much I had been carrying around.

I committed three to four months to this work. Being self-employed gave me the space to dive deep, and I felt it was necessary to do my own inner work before I could help others with theirs. I probably put in hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours during that time.

Through that commitment, I released huge chunks of subconscious programming I didn’t even know were there. I realized I had inherited a lot of my “should” thinking from my upbringing. My mother also had strong expectations; when things didn’t go her way, she’d have intense emotional reactions. I had absorbed that pattern without realizing it.

At the end of those few months, I felt like I had begun the real journey of embodying spiritual growth. Not just reading about it. Living it. Accepting what is became something I could feel in my bones, not just think about.

But that was just the beginning.

Acceptance Happens in Layers

Over the next ten years, I noticed a pattern: about every six months to a year, a similar trigger would arise. Same emotion, same resistance, but less intense. The duration of my suffering shrank, too. What used to upset me for weeks now only remained for a few days, then a few hours.

I came to understand that accepting “what is” happens in layers, like peeling an onion. At first, I released the more obvious emotional charges held in the heart or gut. But as time went on, I discovered deeper, more subtle conditioning stored in the nervous system, bones, tailbone, even in my skin and sense organs.

The body doesn’t release it all at once—maybe because doing so would overwhelm the system. With each layer that releases, it feels like the body grants permission to go deeper.

To find and clear these deeper layers, I learned muscle testing from the Yuen Method of Chinese Energetics that helps uncover subconscious resistances. Muscle testing was quite a powerful experience, teaching me to intuitively talk to the body to find and release unconscious ancestral conditioning and forgotten traumas that are decades-old or generational programs located in different body areas.

My Personal “Should”: Loved Ones Should See My Good Intentions

For example, I used to hate it when my father made negative assumptions about my good intentions or deeds. Instead of appreciating my efforts, he would criticize them, leaving me with the feeling that no matter how hard I tried, it was never good enough for him.

This took me many years to work through, and each year, with each trigger, I discovered so much conditioning. I would have emotional meltdowns; my body would be tense and angry, just like my mom, because that’s how she is. From working on these triggers over the years, he can hardly get a reaction out of me anymore.

I was essentially reacting in a hardwired way. When my father made negative assumptions about my mom, she would often respond with emotional meltdowns and angry outbursts. I realized I had inherited the same pattern.

Over the years, each time my father pushed a button, I had to do continuous work on the different layers of conditioned reactions in specific areas of the body. His button-pushing became a gift: it constantly revealed more hidden layers of emotional reactivity.

These days, if he makes negative assumptions, it might still bother me a little, but it’s nothing like the angry, hateful emotional reactions I used to have. If my body still reacts slightly, it’s giving me feedback, making me aware that there is still unconscious conditioning that needs to be released.

If you do this work, over time, you will notice your loved ones may still push the same buttons and sometimes even say unkind words or behave in ways that used to deeply hurt you. But your triggers and reactivity can be significantly reduced.

You won’t take their words or actions as personally anymore. Instead, there’s a growing sense of love and acceptance—for yourself, the situation, and your loved ones, regardless of what they do. Doing this work feels like moving closer to unconditional love, or at least as close as we can get.

The Ongoing Unfolding of Acceptance

This process taught me that accepting what is isn’t a one-time breakthrough. It’s a slow unwinding of everything we were taught to expect, demand, or resist. It’s a return to what’s actually here, moment by moment, breath by breath.

Even now, I still get triggered. But I’m better at meeting those moments with curiosity instead of judgment. I know the signs in my body. I can feel when something hasn’t been grieved yet.

If you’re like me, if you have a long list of “shoulds” about yourself, about others, about life, maybe it’s time to sit with them. To feel where they land in your body. To grieve the life you thought was supposed to happen.

Because healing doesn’t come from controlling life. It comes from letting go of the fight against it. It comes from feeling into what is, with an open heart and a patient presence.

About Paul Wong

Paul Wong is the founder of Chinese Energetics, a method he’s practiced for over fifteen years to help high-performing professionals release chronic stress and insecurities rooted in generational and early life imprints. His work supports a return to clarity, emotional stability, and grounded inner power. Paul offers live workshops, online classes, and personalized sessions. Learn more at www.chineseenergetics.com or contact him at [email protected].

See a typo or inaccuracy? Please contact us so we can fix it!

“And then I realized that to be seen by others, I first had to be willing to see myself.” ~Anonymous

In a world that teaches us to be visible only when we’re polished, productive, or pleasing, I found something unexpected on the other side of my camera: myself.

But not the filtered version. Not the composed one or the “smiling because I’m fine” version.

I found the person I’d forgotten—the one who had spent years loving, giving, showing up for everyone else but rarely turning any of that tenderness inward.

I didn’t pick up the camera to take pretty pictures. I picked it up because I was afraid I’d disappeared.

I Didn’t Want to Be Seen; I Needed to See Myself

The idea of photographing myself didn’t come from a place of vanity. It came from absence.

One evening, while trying to upload photos for a dating profile after years of single parenting and heartbreak, I realized I had no photos that felt like me. Not the version of me who had weathered so much. Not the version I was becoming.

So I quietly set up a tripod. Brushed my hair off my face. Took a deep breath.

Click.

The first photo felt awkward. The second felt posed. But by the third, something shifted. I saw a glimmer—not just of who I had been, but of who I might become.

This wasn’t about being photogenic. It was about presence.

Each Click Became a Quiet Homecoming

Soon, I started photographing myself regularly. Alone. Unrushed.

Some days, I wore mascara. Other days, I didn’t even brush my hair. And some days, I cried.

But every day, I tried to show up as honestly as I could.

Slowly, I began to notice things I’d overlooked for years:

• Strength in my eyes
• Grace in my aging hands
• Resilience in my stillness

They weren’t just pictures. They were whispers. Visual love letters. A way of saying, “I’m still here.”

And I wasn’t invisible. I’d just been looking through the wrong lens.

I Thought I Was Taking Pictures, but I Was Actually Healing

We live in a culture that celebrates busyness and output. But it rarely teaches us how to witness ourselves—especially in stillness.

In those quiet moments behind the lens, my camera became a gentle teacher. It held space for the version of me that didn’t always feel put together. It didn’t ask me to smile. It didn’t judge. It just saw.

And in being seen—truly seen, by my own eyes—I began to heal.

My camera became more than a tool. It became a mirror. Not the kind that criticizes or compares, but the kind that says, “You’re allowed to take up space. Just as you are.”

Here’s What I Learned (and Keep Learning)

Through this experience, I learned:

• I wasn’t invisible. I just hadn’t looked at myself with curiosity in a long time.
• I had looked with judgment. With fatigue. With shame. But not with compassion.
• These weren’t selfies. They were self-portraits—acts of reclamation.
• I didn’t need to be beautiful. I just needed to be honest.

Each session became a quiet act of rebellion—against perfectionism, against invisibility, against the pressure to perform.

And slowly, a truth emerged: I didn’t need to wait for a milestone to be worthy of attention.
I didn’t need a transformation. I needed permission. Permission to see myself. Permission to say: This is me, now.

From Healing to Helping Others

Eventually, something unexpected happened.

I began to share pieces of my story. And people started reaching out.

• “I feel like I’ve lost myself, too.”
• “I haven’t seen a photo of myself I actually like in years.”
• “I don’t remember the last time I felt comfortable in front of a camera.”

So I started photographing others—not for branding or special events, but for healing.

In natural light, in safe spaces, we’d create images that captured something more than appearance.
We captured presence. Belonging. Truth.

One woman whispered after her session, “I feel like I’ve come home to myself.”

I knew exactly what she meant.

You Don’t Need a Special Occasion to Be Seen

If you’ve ever felt like you’ve gone a little quiet inside…

If you’ve ever looked in the mirror and wondered when you stopped recognizing the person staring back…

If you’ve ever felt like the world sees only a fraction of who you really are…

I want you to know this: you don’t need to wait.

You don’t need to lose ten pounds or gain a promotion or start a new relationship to become worthy of your own gaze.

You already are.

So if you’re feeling invisible, here’s a gentle invitation:

Set up your camera. Let the light fall on your face. Be still. Click.

The first photo might feel strange. The second may feel forced.

But keep going.

Eventually, someone will show up in that frame. And when they do, you’ll remember: you’ve been here all along.

About Shannon Kathleen

Shannon Kathleen is a Minneapolis-based photographer who specializes in self-worth and online dating portraits. After navigating years of single motherhood and quiet reinvention, she began a self-portrait practice that helped her reconnect with her identity — not as a parent, partner, or professional, but as herself. She now helps others rediscover their confidence through the lens. Find her reflections, gentle resources, and photography at shannonkathleenphotography.com

See a typo or inaccuracy? Please contact us so we can fix it!

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E. E. Cummings wrote in his timeless summons for the courage to be yourself. But what does it really mean to be oneself when the self is an ever-moving target of ever-changing sentiments and cells, a figment of fixity to dam the fluidity that carries us along the river of life, to soften the hard fact that we never fully know who we are because we are never one thing long enough. “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion,” Iris Murdoch insisted in her magnificent case for unselfing, and yet we do live out our entire lives in it — the self is our sieve for reality, the sensory organ through which we experience love and politics and the color blue. How to inhabit it with authenticity but without attachment might be the great task of being alive.

The great Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) takes up these immense and intimate questions in The Book of Disquiet (public library) — his posthumously published collection of reflections and revelations partway between autobiography and aphorism, profoundly personal yet shimmering with the universal.

Considering himself “the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it,” with a soul “impatient with itself,” Pessoa writes:

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.

[…]

Perhaps it’s finally time for me to make this one effort: to take a good look at my life. I see myself in the midst of a vast desert. I tell what I literarily was yesterday, and I try to explain to myself how I got here.

[…]

I retreat into myself, get lost in myself, forget myself in far-away nights uncontaminated by duty and the world, undefiled by mystery and the future.

A generation before the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh lost his self and found himself in a dazzling epiphany at the library, Pessoa recounts one such moment when the veils of the self parted long enough to glimpse the vastness of the unself:

All that I’ve done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I’d always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn’t I.

I’m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being. I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought… This sudden awareness of my true being, of this being that has always sleepily wandered between what it feels and what it sees, weighs on me like an untold sentence to serve.

It’s so hard to describe what I feel when I feel I really exist and my soul is a real entity that I don’t know what human words could define it. I don’t know if I have a fever, as I feel I do, or if I’ve stopped having the fever of sleeping through life. Yes, I repeat, I’m like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, without knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time are not themselves but someone else. I was someone else for a long time — since birth and consciousness — and suddenly I’ve woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up till now.

And yet, like Virginia Woolf’s garden epiphany about the creative spirit and Margaret Fuller’s hilltop unselfing into “the All,” such moments of revelation in which the soul contacts reality are but brief sidewise glances at some elemental truth we cannot bear to look at continuously less we dissolve into it. Pessoa reflects:

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting notion of the intimate monad, the soul’s magic word. But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It strips us naked of even ourselves.

Complement with Herman Melville on the mystery of what makes us who we are and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the “same” person despite a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, then revisit Jack Kerouac on the self illusion and the “Golden Eternity” found in its wake.

“Sometimes you have to let go of the life you planned to make room for the life that’s waiting for you.” ~Joseph Campbell

My new motto? Always have a backup plan.

Life rarely goes as you’d imagined.

January 16^th, 2001. That’s the day my life trajectory changed irrevocably. That’s the day that would lead me to, eventually, living alone—to being divorced. That’s the day my ex had a ski accident that changed the lives of every member of our immediate family. But today, I don’t want to talk about him or that. I want to talk about my story, about me. About my aftermath of living alone.

Several years ago, when the last of my daughters graduated from college, loaded her ‘how-can-she-possibly-carry-that!’ backpack, hugged me tight, and boarded a plane for South America with a one-way ticket, I felt a hole in my stomach the size of a meteor crash pit.

I knew so many things at that moment. I knew I had a world of worry ahead of me that would last the duration of her adventure-with-no-end-date.

I knew I’d be going home to an empty house—that was now going to stay empty.

I knew that the axis of my world had suddenly tilted—and nothing would balance the same again.

For years, my married-with-children life had been a whirlwind of stereotypical womanhood: mothering, managing, and multitasking. The house hummed with commotion, packing lunches, planning dinners, visiting teenagers’ shoes haphazardly piled near the front door, family events, lively conversations, and belly laughs—oh, and at a certain point, some derailing by hormone gyrations.

And now? Just me, my omnipresent ADHD-fueled piles of stuff, and a fridge that I wished someone else would clean and organize.

The divorce (after forty years of marriage)? Now, almost a decade in the rearview mirror. The full-time career hustle? Quieted (and mostly regretted). The calendar? More “me-time” than meetings or dates with girlfriends. And let’s not forget the increase in doctors’ appointments compared to before.

On almost every front, I was no longer needed the way I had been.

When my marriage ended, my ex took more than a suitcase and half of our belongings and money. He took our vacations, traditions, and huge parts of my lifestyle—and he unpacked them somewhere new, with someone new.

That reality offered me a chance at a whole new beginning that was all my own but was also utterly unnerving.

Once the noise of change and terrible transitions falls away, what’s left is the deafening question that every fiercely feeling, fabulously flawed woman eventually faces: What do I do with the rest of my life?

The Mirror Doesn’t Lie (But It’s Kind of a Jerk Sometimes)

Here’s the thing nothing can prepare you for when you find yourself alone and start spending real, unfiltered time in solitude:

You meet yourself.

Not the curated version of you that shows up for work, friends, family, or festivities. The real you. The unedited, unmoored, occasionally unhinged version. You with the foibles, flaws, fractures, fixations, fragile truths, and all. At least, that tends to be what you see at first. You’ll also see (sometimes it’s eventually) grace and grit, wisdom and warmth, compassion and courage, intuition and integrity.

And that self you meet, they have questions.

They want to know if you’re proud of how you’ve spent your life. They want to know what you’ve been postponing. And they really want to know why you walked into the kitchen three times today and still forgot what you were looking for.

Being alone strips away distractions. It’s like standing naked in front of a full-length mirror under too-bright lighting. Every flaw feels fluorescent. Every fear comes forward. And every false story and excuse you’ve told yourself asks to be rewritten.

And then there’s the way the outside world begins to see you…

Ma’am? MA’AM?!

I have a calmer demeanor than I used to, but I still feel vibrant. Vivid. Volcanic, even. I know more about the world and myself than I ever have—enough even to realize how little I do know, and that’s half the fun.

And yet, I’ve entered the bizarre “Ma’am Zone.”

You know the one. Where the teenager at the store calls you ma’am while offering to carry your bag. Where the girl in the drive-thru hands you your latte with a chirpy “Here you go, hon.” Grrrrr. (I sometimes educate them that treating ‘older’ people like that is insulting vs respectful).

It’s the zone where people assume you’ve stopped wanting to have wild sex, don’t understand memes, or can’t connect your Wi-Fi extender without calling your child for help. (Um, guilty of the latter. But still.)

It’s where invisibility starts to sneak in—everywhere. You’re not quite old, but you’re no longer relevant or worthy of giving an opinion.

And the most jarring part? You still feel like your younger self is alive and well inside—just now with reading glasses, joint supplements, and a slightly shorter fuse for nonsense.

But here’s the truth: the Ma’am Zone isn’t a punishment. It’s a portal.

Because once you stop chasing approval from the outside, you finally make room for deep reverence on the inside.

Once you stop chasing approval from the outside, you realize your value isn’t measured by someone else’s opinion of you, by your waistline or taut skin, or your appeal to potential partners.

Your value is in how you carry your story, how you exemplify your self-worth, how you show up for others, and how much damn freedom you finally give yourself to just be.

Of course, there are still moments that rattle your chain—like when technology moves faster than your thumbs or when recalling a name or a word requires a full-blown brain excavation.

And it’s not just the memory lapses. It’s the quiet, creeping suspicion that you’re becoming a little… invisible. That in a world obsessed with youth and novelty, you’ve somehow been nudged toward the “used-to-be” pile.

But here’s my radical revelation: This isn’t the end of anything. It’s the beginning of everything.

Learning is My New North Star

This chapter I’ve found myself in—this curious, living-alone, transitional place—it’s a gift. And for me, that gift is the opportunity to dedicate copious amounts of time to learning. Not to impress, not to advance, not to earn letters behind my name. But to be alive.

Learning has become my reason for being in this last season of my life, however many decades that may be.

Oh, I still love deeply. I still mother, I still show up for friends, and I still need connection and community as much as I need air—but these next years of living alone? These are for taking in as much as I’ve given out.

I’ve begun to inhale books, devour documentaries, and dive headfirst into research rabbit holes like a woman on a mission to make up for all the times she didn’t have time and had to put her own curiosity on hold.

I’m back in therapy. I want to finally let go of the weight I don’t want to carry anymore. I want to learn to expand, to evolve, to live in full-blown self-worth, and to stay awake in a world that wants to lull me into irrelevance.

This isn’t just something I do—this is how I live now. Fully. Inquisitively. Intentionally.

I’m learning how to sit in silence without spiraling into regrets and should-haves. How to laugh at myself without lacerating my spirit. How to treasure time without tallying accomplishments.

My Best Friend at the End of My Pen

Amid all this sorting and shifting, quiet rooms and candid reckonings, new beginnings and necessary becoming, there’s one constant that’s never judged me, rushed me, or asked me to explain myself in under two minutes: my journal.

It’s actually been a good (almost better) substitute for my ex, who has known me since I was in my late teens.

No matter what kind of day I’m having—scattered, soulful, soaring, or stuck—it’s always there, waiting.

The page listens like no one else can.

It holds space when I can’t hold it together. And more often than not, I find my best thoughts, my bravest truths, and my clearest next steps scribbled somewhere between the rambling and the real.

That pen? It’s not just ink. It’s true: caring for and being honest with oneself.

And when my brain short-circuits—when I can’t remember if I paid a bill or why I walked into the kitchen for that third time—I turn to my journal. Not because it fixes everything but because it filters the fuzz.

Journaling is where I untangle the mental spaghetti. It’s my personal pause button, my brain’s backup drive, my place to dump the digital overload of modern life and actually hear myself think again.

Some days, it’s a sanctuary. On other days, it’s a sass-fest. But either way, it saves me. From forgetting. From overthinking. From disconnecting from the woman, I’m becoming.

Permission to Be Real, Forgetful, and Free

I’m learning to get curious instead of compliant.

I’m reclaiming my relevance not by proving myself but by being myself—beautifully, brutally, brilliantly real.

I’ve swapped out striving for savoring.

I’ve put down the perfectionism and picked up the pen.

And on the days when I forget what I was saying mid-sentence, I just say, “Well, clearly it wasn’t worth remembering!” and carry on.

No, I don’t have it all figured out. Thank goodness for that.

Life now feels less like a checklist and more like a what-kind-of-day-do-I-want-today? (Note: It’s sometimes a day in bed with snacks and a streaming obsession).

Some days are disco. Others are enlightening. Some days, I still feel sorry for myself. But all of them are mine.

So, if you’re standing in that strange, sacred space between who you’ve been and who you’re becoming, let this be your permission slip:

You don’t need to reinvent yourself.

You just need to remember yourself.

Not who the world wanted or told you that you were supposed to be. Who you are. Under the roles. Behind the titles. Beneath the noise.

There’s magic there. There’s freedom. And yes, there’s still plenty of fire.

A Few Questions to Light the Way

Who am I becoming now that no one’s watching?

What do I want to learn—not to be useful, but to be lit up?

Where am I still dimming my joy because I think it’s “too late”?

What would it look like to stop fixing and start feeling?

Where do I still matter most—to myself?

About Jill Grumbache

Jill Grumbache is the sometimes hilarious, always compassionate wit and founder of Holistic Journaling Ink. She is an unwavering advocate of women’s self-growth and education. She helps women find clarity, courage, calm, and a sense of humor through the written word. Jill is a lifelong journaler, communications specialist, beneficial journaling educator, certified journaling facilitator, and emotional intelligence coach, as well as an award-winning writer and recovering overthinker with ADHD (the latter being one of her favorite traits!). Reach her at [email protected] or www.holisticjournaling.ca.

See a typo or inaccuracy? Please contact us so we can fix it!

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are.” ~Maya Angelou

There was a time in my life when everything felt heavy, like I was constantly carrying around a weight that no one else could see.

I wasn’t in a crisis, exactly. I was functioning, showing up, doing what needed to be done. But inside, I was struggling to stay afloat—trapped in my own head, questioning my worth, and unsure how to move forward.

One evening, I walked into a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class for the first time. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know the rules, the language, or even how to tie the belt on my gi. But I was drawn to it—maybe because I was desperate for something to pull me out of my mental spiral. I needed structure. I needed challenge. I needed escape.

What I didn’t expect was that BJJ would become more than a physical outlet. It became a form of therapy. A place where I could reconnect with my body when my mind felt like a battlefield.

Finding Peace in the Pressure

On the surface, BJJ looks intense—people grappling, sweating, fighting for control. But underneath, it’s a quiet game of survival. You breathe. You adjust. You adapt. You keep going.

There were moments when I would be pinned, completely stuck, with someone twice my size on top of me. I’d panic. My breath would quicken; my thoughts would race. But then I’d hear my coach’s voice in the background: “Slow down. You’re okay. Just breathe.”

That simple instruction saved me more than once—not just on the mat, but in life.

Over time, I started to notice something: I was calmer outside of training. More patient. More aware. Jiu-Jitsu didn’t fix my mental health overnight, but it gave me tools to deal with the days when everything felt like too much.

Losing It… and Finding It Again

Of course, progress isn’t a straight line. After a few years of training, I got injured. Not once—multiple times. Each injury forced me to stop, rest, and reckon with the fear that maybe I wouldn’t return.

Without Jiu-Jitsu, I felt lost again. That familiar darkness crept back in, and I realized how much I had come to rely on the practice to stay grounded. But eventually, I returned. Slower, more cautious, but more appreciative than ever.

I realized it wasn’t about being the best or earning stripes. It was about showing up—for myself.

What I’ve Learned

I used to think healing meant getting rid of pain. Now I understand it’s more about learning to live with it—and learning how to move with it, not against it.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu taught me resilience, yes. But more importantly, it taught me presence. You can’t be stuck in your head when someone’s trying to choke you out. You have to be here, now.

That practice of presence changed how I approached everything else—relationships, work, rest. It helped me become someone who doesn’t give up so easily, even when things get hard.

Why I’m Sharing This

Maybe you’re not into martial arts. Maybe you’ve never set foot in a gym. That’s okay. This isn’t about Jiu-Jitsu—it’s about finding the thing that brings you back to yourself. That reminds you of your strength when you’ve forgotten it.

It could be yoga, running, painting, journaling, hiking, music. It could be therapy. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it helps you come home to yourself.

If you’re going through something right now, I want you to know: You’re not weak for struggling. You’re not broken. And you’re not alone.

Find your mat—whatever that looks like for you. And when you do, keep showing up. You might be surprised at how strong you already are.

About Robert Grover

Robert is a lifelong martial arts student and the founder of Divine Jiu Jitsu, a small mission-driven brand that supports mental health through community and apparel. He trains BJJ in Scotland and believes in the power of presence, pressure, and showing up when it’s hard. Find him on Instagram @Divine_jiujitsu or at divinejiujitsu.com.

See a typo or inaccuracy? Please contact us so we can fix it!

For years, any time I felt sadness, insecurity, loneliness, or any of those “unwelcome” feelings, I jumped into action.

I’d look for something new to take on: a class, a language, a project, a degree. Once, in the span of a single week, I signed up for language classes, researched getting certified in something I didn’t actually want to do, and convinced myself I needed to start training for a 10K.

Because if I was doing something productive, I wouldn’t have to sit with what I was feeling. That was the pattern: uncomfortable emotion → frantic pursuit of something “more.”

I became a master at staying busy. If I was chasing something, I didn’t have to face the ache underneath. But the relief was always temporary, and the crash afterward was always the same.

Because deep down, I wasn’t looking for a new skill. I was looking for a way to feel like I was enough.

I once heard someone say, “We can never get enough of what we don’t need.” I felt that in my bones.

Looking back, I can see why. I spent a lot of my life trying to earn my place, not because anyone said I wasn’t enough, but because it never really felt safe to just be. There was a kind of emotional instability in my world growing up that made me hyperaware of how others were feeling and what they needed from me.

I got really good at shape-shifting, staying useful, and keeping the peace, which eventually morphed into perfectionism, people-pleasing, and a chronic drive to prove myself. I didn’t know how to feel safe without performing. So, of course I kept chasing “more.” It was never about achievement. It was about survival.

But no matter how much I accomplished, I never felt satisfied. Or safe. Or enough.

It reminded me of something a nutritionist once told me: when your body isn’t properly absorbing nutrients, eating more food won’t fix the problem; it might even make things worse. You have to heal what’s interfering with absorption. The same is true emotionally.

When we don’t feel grounded or whole, adding more—more goals, more healing, more striving—doesn’t solve the problem. We have to look at what’s blocking us from receiving what we already have. We have to heal the system first.

We live in a culture that convinces us that growth is about accumulation.

More insight. More advice. More goals. More tools. If you’re stuck, clearly you haven’t found the right “more” yet.

So we reach for books, podcasts, frameworks, plans, certifications—anything to build ourselves into someone new.

But here’s what I’ve learned from years of doing my own work: Real growth doesn’t come from becoming someone new. It comes from letting go of what no longer serves you so that you can make room for the version of you that’s trying to emerge.

There’s a quote attributed to Michelangelo that says, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

He believed his sculptures were already complete inside the stone; his job was simply to remove what wasn’t part of them.

When I heard that, I realized: That’s exactly how real transformation works. Not more, not better, not shinier. Just… less in the way.

But when people feel stuck, they react by piling on layer after layer of effort, advice, and activity until the thing they are actually looking for (peace, clarity, ease, joy) gets buried even deeper.

When we feel inadequate or incomplete, our instinct is to reach outward for something to fill the space. But the real work is to turn inward and get curious about what that space is trying to show us.

That might sound airy-fairy, but the truth is, identifying and transforming the parts of us that are carrying old stories isn’t passive. It’s not just a mindset shift or a nice thought on a coffee mug. It’s work.

It’s learning how to sit with discomfort without immediately escaping into productivity.

It’s noticing the parts of us that over-function, over-apologize, and over-control and asking where they learned to do that. It’s exploring the beliefs we’ve carried for years, like “I have to earn my worth” or “If I stop striving, I’ll disappear”—and getting curious about who they actually belong to and what they really need from us.

This isn’t about erasing who you’ve been. It’s about honoring the roles you played to survive and choosing not to let them lead anymore.

You don’t have to overhaul your personality or give up on ambition. This work is about clearing away what’s outdated and misaligned. The thoughts, roles, and behaviors that might have kept you safe once—but are now keeping you stuck.

Here’s what that might look like:

• Letting go of the belief that love must be earned.
• Dismantling the habit of saying “yes” to avoid disappointing others.
• Releasing the fear that setting boundaries will make you unlovable.
• Recognizing that staying small isn’t humility, it’s protection.

I’ve used every one of these tools myself. I began to notice when I was performing instead of connecting, fixing instead of feeling. I caught myself hustling for approval and validation and started asking: What am I afraid will happen if I stop? I practiced pausing. I gave myself permission to rest, to say no, to take up space. And slowly, I began to trust that I didn’t have to be more to be enough.

This kind of letting go isn’t instant. It requires awareness, compassion, and support. It requires choosing to stop running and start listening… to yourself.

Many of us are afraid to let go because we believe we’ll be left with less—less identity, less stability, less value. But in my experience, the opposite is true.

When we stop performing and start unlearning, we uncover a version of ourselves that feels more whole than anything we could have constructed.

Under the perfectionism? There’s peace.

Under the overthinking? There’s clarity.

Under the fear of being too much? There’s boldness.

We are not lacking. We are hidden.

If this resonates with you—if you’re tired of doing more and still feeling stuck, here are a few places to begin:

Pause the performance. Notice when you’re trying to “fix” something about yourself. Ask what you’re feeling underneath the fixing.

• Identify the beliefs you inherited. Were you taught you had to earn love? Be useful to be safe? Stay small to be accepted?
• Get curious about your patterns. What roles do you play at work, in relationships, in your head? Where did they start?
• Create space. That might mean working with a coach or therapist or simply setting time aside to be with yourself, without distraction.
• Be gentle. You’re not broken. You’re patterned. And patterns can be unlearned.

Here’s what I want you to know: what’s on the other side of the removal process isn’t emptiness. It’s clarity. Peace. Energy. Trust.

That person you’re trying so hard to build? That person is already there, just waiting for you to set them free.

About Melissa Lorin Treuman

Melissa Lorin Treuman is a holistic leadership coach who helps people identify and transform the hidden blocks that keep them from leading the lives they long for. Her work blends emotional insight, somatic practices, and actionable tools to help create real, lasting change. Find her at melissalorinleadership.com.

See a typo or inaccuracy? Please contact us so we can fix it!